Joyland (8 page)

Mrs. Shoplaw smiled. “I always mark the beginning of summer this way, for good luck. It seems to work. I haven’t lost a seasonal hire yet. Each of you take a glass, please.” We did as we were told. “Tina, will you pour?”

When the flutes were full, Mrs. Shoplaw raised hers and we raised ours.

“Here is to Erin, Tom, and Devin,” she said. “May they have a wonderful summer, and wear the fur only when the temperature is below eighty degrees.”

We clinked glasses and drank. Maybe not the high-priced spread, but pretty damned good, and with enough left for us all to have another swallow. This time it was Tom who offered the toast. “Here’s to Mrs. Shoplaw, who gives us shelter from the storm!”

“Why, thank you, Tom, that’s lovely. It won’t get you a discount on the rent, though.”

We drank. I set my glass down feeling just the tiniest bit buzzy. “What is this about wearing the fur?” I asked.

Mrs. Shoplaw and Miss Ackerley looked at each other and smiled. It was the librarian who answered, although it wasn’t really an answer at all. “You’ll find out,” she said.

“Don’t stay up late, children,” Mrs. Shoplaw advised. “You’ve got an early call. Your career in show business awaits.”

The call
was
early: seven
AM
, two hours before the park opened its doors on another summer. The three of us walked down the beach together. Tom talked most of the way. He always talked. It would have been wearisome if he hadn’t been so amusing and relentlessly cheerful. I could see from the way Erin (walking in the surf with her sneakers dangling from the fingers of her left hand) looked at him that she was charmed and fascinated. I envied Tom his ability to do that. He was heavyset and at least three doors down from handsome, but he was energetic and possessed of the gift of gab I sadly lacked. Remember the old joke about the starlet who was so clueless she fucked the writer?

“Man, how much do you think the people who own those places are worth?” he asked, waving an arm at the houses on Beach Row. We were just passing the big green one that looked like a castle, but there was no sign of the woman and the boy in the wheelchair that day. Annie and Mike Ross came later.

“Millions, probably,” Erin said. “It ain’t the Hamptons, but as my dad would say, it ain’t cheeseburgers.”

“The amusement park probably brings the property values down a little,” I said. I was looking at Joyland’s three most distinctive landmarks, silhouetted against the blue morning sky: Thunderball, Delirium Shaker, Carolina Spin.

“Nah, you don’t understand the rich-guy mindset,” Tom said. “It’s like when they pass bums looking for handouts on the street. They just erase ’em from their field of vision. Bums? What bums? And that park, same deal—what park? People who own these houses live, like, on another plane of existence.” He stopped, shading his eyes and looking at the green Victorian that was going to play such a large part in my life that fall, after Erin Cook and Tom Kennedy, by then a couple, had gone back to school. “That one’s gonna be mine. I’ll be expecting to take possession on . . . mmm . . . June first, 1987.”

“I’ll bring the champagne,” Erin said, and we all laughed.

I saw Joyland’s entire crew of summer hires in one place for the first and last time that morning. We gathered in Surf Auditorium, the concert hall where all those B-list country acts and aging rockers performed. There were almost two hundred of us. Most, like Tom, Erin, and me, were college students willing to work for peanuts. Some of the full-timers were there, as well. I saw Rozzie Gold, today dressed for work in her gypsy duds and dangly earrings. Lane Hardy was up on stage, placing a mike at the podium and then checking it with a series of thudding finger-taps. His derby was present and accounted for, cocked at its usual just-so angle. I don’t know how he picked me out in all those milling kids, but he did, and sketched a little salute off the tilted brim of his lid. I sent him one right back.

He finished his work, nodded, jumped off the stage, and took the seat Rozzie had been saving for him. Fred Dean walked briskly out from the wings. “Be seated, please, all of you be seated. Before you get your team assignments, the owner of Joyland—and your employer—would like to say a few words. Please give a hand to Mr. Bradley Easterbrook.”

We did as we were told, and an old man emerged from the wings, walking with the careful, high-stepping strides of someone with bad hips, a bad back, or both. He was tall and amazingly thin, dressed in a black suit that made him look more like an undertaker than a man who owned an amusement park. His face was long, pale, covered with bumps and moles. Shaving must have been torture for him, but he had a clean one. Ebony hair that had surely come out of a bottle was swept back from his deeply lined brow. He stood beside the podium, his enormous hands—they seemed to be nothing but knuckles—clasped before him. His eyes were set deep in pouched sockets.

Age looked at youth, and youth’s applause first weakened, then died.

I’m not sure what we expected; possibly a mournful foghorn voice telling us that the Red Death would soon hold sway over all. Then he smiled, and it lit him up like a jukebox. You could almost hear a sigh of relief rustle through the summer hires. I found out later that was the summer Bradley Easterbrook turned ninety-three.

“You guys,” he said, “welcome to Joyland.” And then, before stepping behind the podium, he actually bowed to us. He took several seconds adjusting the mike, which produced a series of amplified screeks and scronks. He never took his sunken eyes from us as he did it.

“I see many returning faces, a thing that always makes me happy. For you greenies, I hope this will be the best summer of your lives, the yardstick by which you judge all your future employment. That is no doubt an extravagant wish, but anyone who runs a place like this year in and year out must have a wide streak of extravagance. For certain you’ll never have another job like it.”

He surveyed us, giving the poor mike’s articulated neck another twist as he did so.

“In a few moments, Mr. Dean and Mrs. Brenda Rafferty, who is queen of the front office, will give you your team assignments. There will be seven of you to a team, and you will be expected to act as a team and work as a team. Your team’s tasks will be assigned by your team leader and will vary from week to week, sometimes from day to day. If variety is the spice of life, you will find the next three months very spicy, indeed. I hope you will keep one thought foremost in your mind, young ladies and gentlemen. Will you do that?”

He paused as if expecting us to answer, but nobody made a sound. We only looked at him, a very old man in a black suit and a white shirt open at the collar. When he spoke again, it might have been himself he was talking to, at least to begin with.

“This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. Those of you who don’t already know that will come to know it. Given such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun. In exchange for the hard-earned dollars of your customers, you will parcel out happiness. Children will go home and dream of what they saw here and what they did here. I hope you will remember that when the work is hard, as it sometimes will be, or when people are rude, as they often will be, or when you feel your best efforts have gone unappreciated. This is a different world, one that has its own customs and its own language, which we simply call the Talk. You’ll begin learning it today. As you learn to talk the Talk, you’ll learn to walk the walk. I’m not going to explain that, because it can’t be explained; it can only be learned.”

Tom leaned close to me and whispered, “Talk the talk? Walk the walk? Did we just wander into an AA meeting?”

I hushed him. I had come in expecting to get a list of commandments, mostly
thou shalt nots;
instead I had gotten a kind of rough poetry, and I was delighted. Bradley Easterbrook surveyed us, then suddenly displayed those horsey teeth in another grin. This one looked big enough to eat the world. Erin Cook was staring at him raptly. So were most of the new summer hires. It was the way students stare at a teacher who offers a new and possibly wonderful way of looking at reality.

“I hope you’ll enjoy your work here, but when you don’t—when, for instance, it’s your turn to wear the fur—try to remember how privileged you are. In a sad and dark world, we are a little island of happiness. Many of you already have plans for your lives—you hope to become doctors, lawyers, I don’t know, politicians—”

“OH-GOD-NO!”
someone shouted, to general laughter.

I would have said Easterbrook’s grin could not possibly have widened, but it did. Tom was shaking his head, but he had also given in. “Okay, now I get it,” he whispered in my ear. “This guy is the Jesus of Fun.”

“You’ll have interesting, fruitful lives, my young friends. You’ll do many good things and have many remarkable experiences. But I hope you’ll always look back on your time in Joyland as something special. We don’t sell furniture. We don’t sell cars. We don’t sell land or houses or retirement funds. We have no political agenda.
We sell fun.
Never forget that. Thank you for your attention. Now go forth.”

He stepped away from the podium, gave another bow, and left the stage in that same painful, high-stepping stride. He was gone almost before the applause began. It was one of the best speeches I ever heard, because it was truth rather than horse-shit. I mean, listen: how many rubes can put
sold fun for three months in 1973
on their resumes?

All the team leaders were long-time Joyland employees who worked the carny circuit as showies in the off-season. Most were also on the Park Services Committee, which meant they had to deal with state and federal regulations (both very loose in 1973), and field customer complaints. That summer most of the complaints were about the new no-smoking policy.

Our team leader was a peppy little guy named Gary Allen, a seventy-something who ran the Annie Oakley Shootin’ Gallery. Only none of us called it that after the first day. In the Talk, a shooting gallery was a bang-shy and Gary was the bang-shy agent. The seven of us on Team Beagle met him at his joint, where he was setting out rifles on chains. My first official Joyland job—along with Erin, Tom, and the other four guys on the team—was putting the prizes on the shelves. The ones that got pride of place were the big fuzzy stuffed animals that hardly anyone ever won . . . although, Gary said, he was careful to give out at least one every evening when the tip was hot.

“I like the marks,” he said. “Yes I do. And the marks I like the best are the points, by which I mean the purty girls, and the points I like the best are the ones who wear the low-cut tops and bend forrad to shoot like this.” He snatched up a .22 modified to shoot BBs (it had also been modified to make a loud and satisfying bang with each trigger-pull) and leaned forward to demonstrate.

“When a guy does that, I notify ’em that they’re foulin the line. The points? Never.”

Ronnie Houston, a bespectacled, anxious-looking young man wearing a Florida State University cap, said: “I don’t see any foul-line, Mr. Allen.”